At 4.00 am I woke up to the distinctive sound of a leopard coughing right next to our bedroom window. Fully awake I let my eyes adjust to the darkness – and there he was again: The big male from last night was headed straight into the thickets next to our bedroom. The commotions I cause got Spots up as well and so he was able to catch a glimpse of the leopard as well. After the excitement had subdued again, we returned to club duvet to get some more sleep. Seeing that we had been up well into the night the day before, we had planned to have a bit of a lie in this morning and only got up with sunrise.

Sipping coffee and watching the waterhole, some hartebeest came for a drink.

Around 8am we set off towards the north where anne-marie had left to already earlier in search of Gertie and her cubs. It was another quiet drive bar from the birdies that made themselves available to us:

It was getting hot and we were desperate to get back to the camp to get some rest, so we travelled at high speed – the allowed 50km/h. Still we checked every waterhole on the way and on the loop of the 14th we met bucky and his family who told us about a melanistic gabar goshawk sitting in a tree we had just passed. Of course I made Spots turn around to see that special raptor myself.

They had also told us about a martial sitting very close to the road on the 13th loop, but by the time we got there, the martial had put quite some distance between himself and the approaching cars.

In the afternoon the sky was starting to cloud and darken, the air hot, heavy and not a breeze to easy the warmth. Nothing was moving anymore as the critters seem to have sensed the upcoming rain. Well, the squirrels were still active though:

Seeing that the waterhole would probably be very unproductive in the rain, I wanted to go on an afternoon drive, hoping for some spectacular colours over the riverbed once the sun broke through the clouds. Well, it didn’t really…

We left the camp northbound in order to see if we could find the cheetah mum with her three cubs. We were cheetah deprived and hoped for easing that ailment. Hardly out of the camp we found some giraffes feeding. But that’s all they did. They never acknowledge our presence by looking at us.

Just before arriving at Sitzas, actually I had thought we had arrived at that waterhole already, but it was only a puddle from the rain, we bumped into a huge traffic jam – in KTP terms – of 6 or 7 cars. People were so desperate to see something that they even stopped for tawnies, which most of them probably wouldn’t have if there had been lions around.

They got a bit annoyed with all the attention and flew a bit further off to a puddle in the road. But of course they wouldn’t stay for long as there is always somebody who can’t wait to pass.